Lords have laid ground for full Northern Ireland devolution

Within the space of 24 hours on the same floor of the same Belfast riverside hotel this week, two members of the House of Lords inadvertently created further momentum towards the final act of devolution in Northern Ireland.

First up came the former Liberal Democrat leader, Lord Paddy Ashdown, who chairs Northern Ireland's parades commission, the body which has the power to ban, re-route or approve of controversial marches.

Inside the Belfast Hilton hotel on Wednesday, he announced his strategic review of parading issues intended, ultimately, to abolish the commission altogether. In its place, Ashdown and his fellow commissioners, who include loyalists and republicans, proposed handing over decision-making powers to a small committee set up by the first and deputy first ministers of Northern Ireland.

Among those who sit on the commission and drew up the proposals was senior west Belfast republican and close ally of Gerry Adams, Sean 'Spike' Murray. Just prior to its announcement, two groups representing Catholic residents living on the most contested thoroughfares, Belfast's Lower Ormeau Road and the Garvaghy Road in Portadown, flatly rejected the dumping of the commission. They argued the whole process of deliberating on parades would be compromised by party politics at Stormont; that there would no longer be any independent adjudication.

Murray refused to comment on whether or not the two residents' groups had been wrong to criticise the abolition decision even before their report was published. Perhaps the two organisations who have resisted Orange parades passing through their areas sensed there was a wider political game taking place.

Ashdown certainly hinted at that when he said the commission's abolition was contingent on policing and justice powers being fully devolved to the Northern Ireland assembly. He even described the move as the "last piece in the jigsaw".

The commission, as another of its members, Orange Order chaplain Mervyn Gibson acknowledged, is loathed by a large section of the unionist community because of its perceived bias in favour of nationalists in marching disputes. Privately, many in the dominant unionist party, the DUP, have conceded that getting rid of the body could be a useful way of sugar coating the bitter pill of policing and justice powers being devolved.

Many inside and outside the DUP are nervous of the prospect of a Sinn Féin minister taking control of either the policing and justice ministries, especially given the republicans' record in killing police officers and members of the judiciary during the Troubles.

Ashdown and his group publicly deny the parades commission has been sacrificed as part of a bigger game at Stormont. Nonetheless, the DUP will sell the final act of devolution in part by reminding its base that they can get rid of the hated body that bans their Orange bretheren's parades by accepting the transfer of powers over the police and the judicial system.

In turn, such perception of horse trading between the DUP and Sinn Féin unnerves those in the republican community who previously supported the Adams-McGuinness leadership but now are uncertain as to where the new, once unthinkable alliance is taking their project.

It is hardly a coincidence that a leading figure in one of those residents' groups now belongs to Eirgi, a new leftist republican pressure group founded by disgruntled Sinn Féin members. He is unlikely to stay silent over the issue for much longer.

A day after Ashdown departed the Hilton, in came Lord Alderdice, who used to be the leader of one of Ashdown's liberal sister parties, the centrist Alliance Party. He was there as spokesperson and co-chair of yet another important peace-process quango, the International Monitoring Commission (IMC). It was set up to oversee and evaluate the status of all the paramilitary ceasefires.

In its 18th report published on Thursday, the IMC had some very good news for the British and Irish governments. The IRA's transformation into purely peaceful politics was nearing an end, the IMC noted. The Provos were effectively going out of business as a paramilitary movement, they said.

There was, however, one outstanding issue remaining that could derail the journey towards full devolution - the murder of South Armagh man Paul Quinn. The 21-year-old was lured to his death last October in a carefully planned ambush at a farmhouse across the border in the Irish Republic. His family and their supporters have blamed the local IRA for being responsible, claiming their son was targeted for standing up to a number of leading South Armagh republicans.

The IMC has concluded that the IRA leadership played no part nor sanctioned or organised the Quinn murder. Although pace the BBC's coverage of the report, the IMC did not rule out that individual IRA members killed Quinn during the savage beating.

Exonerating the IRA of corporate responsibility, though, does de-escalate the controversy and prevents it from standing in the way of full devolution. Some might say the timing of these two reports was purely coincidental; other cynical voices will wonder about possible sequencing. Either way, the findings of two lords might have made the day when local politicians take control of the police and judiciary come closer than ever.